Cannes Lions

It's all in the mind: Belgian Mindreader and Mindtunes creators Duval Guillaume get ready for The Drum live

By Angela Haggerty, Reporter

Duval Guillaume

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Cannes Lions article

June 19, 2013 | 4 min read

With almost 10 million YouTube hits and a captivated audience, it comes as no surprise that the Mindreader video from Belgian agency Duval Guillaume won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions festival for PR.

The award was one of seven - three golds, three bronze and one silver - in total for the agency, whose head of digital strategy, Kris Hoet, will be London bound in July to attend The Drum Live event and contribute to the creation of the magazine in a single day.Hoet explained the challenge behind the Mindreader campaign, which was created for the Federation of Belgian Banks (Febelfin) to raise awareness of internet fraud."The Federation of Belgian Banks is not really the country's most popular organisation because it represents banks and I presume it's the same all over Europe because banks are not the most popular organisation around latetly," he said."But they had a message that was very important, that is that most of the fraud that happens with online banking is not so much around the fact you need a virus scanner but the fact you share so much information online."Hoet explained the concept for the video followed two years of trying to raise awareness with much less success, mainly because consumers failed to realise it was a problem for everyone."We needed to do something that would open people's eyes so that they would rethink the amount of information they share."And so Mindreader was born. The agency invited an unsuspecting audience to what they thought was a TV pilot, requesting a name and photograph to keep on file while they queued up, enabling staff to begin scouring social networks for information to feed through to the mindreader.The ad became hugely popular and the reaction was particularly positive given what Hoet admits is usually a boring topic for consumers to engage with."But what was interesting for us was that the topic then received coverage from newspapers and magazines about the risks related to sharing so much information, which was the issue we were trying to raise," Hoet continued, adding that the organisation's spokeswoman went on to become a regular media contact for comment on related issues, a contrast to being cold-shouldered and lumped in with the negative perception of banks before the ad was released.Duval Guillaume has just released its latest campaign with Smirnoff, Mindtunes, which used the brainwaves of three physically disabled musicians to create a Drum & Bass track, produced by DJ Fresh.

"The idea we had is that there's creativity everywhere, in places where people don't necessarily see it, so what we tried to convey was that Smirnoff creates creativity where others don't," said Hoet. "We wanted to prove that people can still make music, or be ceative, if they're given the right tools."Hoet will be heading to London for The Drum Live event taking place on 3 July, where the team from The Drum will work with a live audience of industry names - including marketing director at Play.com Adam Stewart; managing director UK & Benelux, Spotify, Adam 'Sven' Williams; and head of social media at Asda, Dom Burch - to produce an entire magazine in a single day."Like Mindtunes, the idea is very simple - you just have to go do it. I think it's an interesting idea, to make a magazine live, I'm looking forward to seeing how it will be put together and I'm hoping to see and meet a lot of interesting people and be inspired creatively by the event."Visit The Drum Live website to find out more information about the event and how you can get tickets
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